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The comment to the last post by James Russell raises the interesting issue of visualising characters as actors - James "got" Edward James Olmos as Dreyfus in The Prefect. I certainly wasn't thinking of that actor when I wrote the Dreyfus sequences in the book, but he wouldn't be a bad choice, in the unlikely event that the novel would ever need casting. He certainly has something of Dreyfus's dour intensity - and of course, he has a history of playing policemen.
It begs the question, though: when writers sit down to develop a character, to what extent does "dream casting" factor into the process? I made no secret of the fact that I visualised Clavain (from Redemption Ark, Absolution Gap etc) as an older, grizzled Sean Connery - in fact, I was thinking specifically of the Russian submarine commander he plays in The Hunt for Red October. But now that I'm done with Clavain, and I see him from the outside - as a character in some stories that I hardly remember writing - the Connery association is now much less important, if it's there at all. He could just as easily be played by Ian McKellan, come to think of it.
I know I'm not the only writer who indulges in dream casting, but it's not something that you see discussed in public very often. And perhaps I'm less inclined to show my cards now than I was a few years ago. If you want to know who I had in mind as Floyd, for instance, you'll need to pin me down in public, preferably over a beer (oh, all right - John Goodman). But I'm not going to tell you who I had in mind for Dreyfus, or Gaffney, or Thalia... at least until that book is well out of my system...
